"Since the issue of Palestinian national rights in a Palestinian
state reached the agenda of diplomacy in the mid-1970s, 'the prime
obstacle to its realization', unambiguously, has been the United
States government, with the Times staking a claim to be second on
the list.."

The fundamental principle is that "we are good" --
"we" being the state we serve -- and what "we"
do is dedicated to the highest principles, though there may be
errors in practice. In a typical illustration, according to the
retrospective version at the left-liberal extreme, the properly
reshaped Vietnam War began with "blundering efforts to do
good" but by 1969 had become a "disaster" (Anthony
Lewis) -- by 1969, after the business world had turned against the
war as too costly and 70 per cent of the public regarded it as
"fundamentally wrong and immoral", not "a
mistake"; by 1969, seven years after Kennedy's attack on South
Vietnam began, two years after the most respected Vietnam specialist
and military historian Bernard Fall warned that "Vietnam as a
cultural and historic entity... is threatened with
extinction...[as]... the countryside literally dies under the blows
of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area of this
size"; by 1969, the time of some of the most vicious state
terrorist operations of one of the major crimes of the late 20th
century, of which Swift Boats in the deep South, already devastated
by saturation bombing, chemical warfare and mass murder operations,
were the least of the atrocities underway. But the reshaped history
prevails. Serious expert panels ponder the reasons for
"America's Vietnam Obsession" during the 2004 elections,
when the Vietnam War was never even mentioned -- the actual one,
that is, not the image reconstructed for history.

The fundamental principle has corollaries. The first is that clients
are basically good, though less so than "we". To the
extent that they conform to US demands, they are "healthy
pragmatists". Another is that enemies are very bad; how bad
depends on how intensively "we" are attacking them or
planning to do so. Their status can shift very quickly, in
conformity with these guidelines. Thus the current administration
and their immediate mentors were quite appreciative of Saddam
Hussein and helpful to him while he was just gassing Kurds,
torturing dissidents and smashing a Shia rebellion that might have
overthrown him in 1991, because of his contribution to
"stability" -- a code word for "our" domination
-- and his usefulness for US exporters, as frankly declared. But the
same crimes became the proof of his ultimate evil when the
appropriate time came for "us," proudly bearing the banner
of Good, to invade Iraq and install what will be called a
"democracy" if it obeys orders and contributes to
"stability".

The principles are simple, and easy to remember for those seeking a
career in respectable circles. The remarkable consistency of their
application has been extensively documented. That is expected in
totalitarian states and military dictatorships, but is a far more
instructive phenomenon in free societies, where one cannot seriously
plead fear in extenuation.

The death of Arafat provides another in the immense list of case
studies. I'll keep to The New York Times (NYT), the most important
newspaper in the world, and The Boston Globe, perhaps more than
others the local newspaper of the liberal educated elite.

The front-page NYT think-piece (12 November) begins by depicting
Arafat as "both the symbol of the Palestinian's hope for a
viable, independent state and the prime obstacle to its
realization". It goes on to explain that he never was able to
reach the heights of President Anwar Sadat of Egypt; Sadat "
[won] back the Sinai through a peace treaty with Israel"
because he was able to "reach out to Israelis and address their
fears and hopes" (quoting Shlomo Avineri, Israeli philosopher
and former government official, in the follow-up, 13 November).

One can think of more serious obstacles to the realisation of a
Palestinian state, but they are excluded by the guiding principles,
as is the truth about Sadat -- which Avineri at least surely knows.
Let's remind ourselves of a few.

Since the issue of Palestinian national rights in a Palestinian
state reached the agenda of diplomacy in the mid-1970s, "the
prime obstacle to its realization", unambiguously, has been the
US government, with the NYT staking a claim to be second on the
list. That has been clear ever since January 1976, when Syria
introduced a resolution to the UN Security Council calling for a
two-state settlement. The resolution incorporated the crucial
wording of UN 242 -- the basic document, all agree. It accorded to
Israel the rights of any state in the international system,
alongside of a Palestinian state in the territories Israel had
conquered in 1967. The resolution was vetoed by the US. It was
supported by the leading Arab states. Arafat's PLO condemned
"the tyranny of the veto". There were some abstentions on
technicalities.

By then, a two-state settlement in these terms had become a very
broad international consensus, blocked only by the US (and rejected
by Israel). So matters continued, not only in the Security Council
but also in the General Assembly, which passed similar resolutions
regularly by votes like 150-2 (with the US sometimes picking up
another client state). The US also blocked similar initiatives from
Europe and the Arab states.

Meanwhile the NYT refused -- the word is accurate -- to publish the
fact that through the 1980s, Arafat was calling for negotiations
which Israel rejected. The Israeli mainstream press would run
headlines about Arafat's call for direct negotiations with Israel,
rejected by Shimon Peres on the basis of his doctrine that Arafat's
PLO "cannot be a partner to negotiations". And shortly
after, NYT Pulitzer-prize winning Jerusalem correspondent Thomas
Friedman, who could certainly read the Hebrew press, would write
articles lamenting the distress of Israeli peace forces because of
"the absence of any negotiating partner", while Peres
deplores the lack of a "peace movement among the Arab people
[such as] we have among the Jewish people", and explains again
that there can be no PLO participation in negotiations "as long
as it is remaining a shooting organisation and refuses to
negotiate". All of this shortly after yet another Arafat offer
to negotiate that the NYT refused to report, and almost three years
after the Israeli government's rejection of Arafat's offer for
negotiations leading to mutual recognition. Peres, meanwhile, is
described as a "healthy pragmatist", by virtue of the
guidelines.

Matters did change somewhat in the 1990s, when the Clinton
administration declared all UN resolutions "obsolete and
anachronistic{", and crafted its own form of rejectionism. The
US remains alone in blocking a diplomatic settlement. A recent
important example was the presentation of the Geneva Accords in
December 2002, supported by the usual very broad international
consensus, with the usual exception: "The United States
conspicuously was not among the governments sending a message of
support," the NYT reported in a dismissive article (2 December
2002).

This is only a small fragment of a diplomatic record that is so
consistent, and so dramatically clear, that it is impossible to miss
-- unless one keeps rigidly to the history shaped by those who own
it.

Let's turn to the second example: Sadat's reaching out to Israelis
and thereby gaining the Sinai in 1979, a lesson to the bad Arafat.
Turning to unacceptable history, in February 1971 Sadat offered a
full peace treaty to Israel, in accord with then- official US policy
-- specifically, Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai -- with scarcely
even a gesture to Palestinian rights. Jordan followed with similar
offers. Israel recognised that it could have full peace, but Golda
Meir's Labour government chose to reject the offers in favour of
expansion, then into the northeast Sinai, where Israel was driving
thousands of Bedouins into the desert and destroying their villages,
mosques, cemeteries, homes, in order to establish the all-Jewish
city of Yamit.

The crucial question, as always, was how the US would react.
Kissinger prevailed in an internal debate, and the US adopted his
policy of "stalemate": no negotiations, only force. The US
continued to reject -- more accurately, ignore -- Sadat's efforts to
pursue a diplomatic course, backing Israel's rejectionism and
expansion. That stance led to the 1973 War, which was a very close
call for Israel and possibly the world; the US called a nuclear
alert. By then even Kissinger understood that Egypt could not be
dismissed as a basket case, and he began his "shuttle
diplomacy", leading to the Camp David meetings at which the US
and Israel accepted Sadat's 1971 offer -- but now with far harsher
terms, from the US-Israeli point of view. By then the international
consensus had come to recognise Palestinian national rights, and,
accordingly, Sadat called for a Palestinian state, anathema to the
US-Israel.

In the official history reshaped by its owners, and repeated by
media think-pieces, these events are a "diplomatic
triumph" for the US and a proof that if Arabs were only able to
join us in preferring peace and diplomacy that could achieve their
aims. In actual history, the triumph was a catastrophe, and the
events demonstrated that the US was willing only to accede to
violence. The US rejection of diplomacy led to a terrible and very
dangerous war and many years of suffering, with bitter effects to
this day.

In his memoirs, General Shlomo Gazit, military commander of the
occupied territories from 1967-1974, observes that by refusing to
consider proposals advanced by the military and intelligence for
some form of self-rule in the territories or even limited political
activity, and by insisting on "substantial border
changes", the Labour government supported by Washington bears
significant responsibility for the later rise of the fanatic Gush
Emunim settler movement and the Palestinian resistance that
developed many years later in the first Intifada, after years of
brutality and state terror, and steady takeover of valuable
Palestinian lands and resources.

The lengthy obituary of Arafat by Times Middle East specialist
Judith Miller (11 November) proceeds in the same vein as the
front-page think-piece. According to her version, "Until 1988,
[Arafat] repeatedly rejected recognition of Israel, insisting on
armed struggle and terror campaigns. He opted for diplomacy only
after his embrace of President Saddam Hussein of Iraq during the
Persian Gulf war in 1991."

Miller does give an accurate rendition of official history. In
actual history Arafat repeatedly offered negotiations leading to
mutual recognition, while Israel -- in particular the dovish
"pragmatists" -- flatly refused, backed by Washington. In
1989, the Israeli coalition government (Shamir-Peres) affirmed the
political consensus in its peace plan. The first principle was that
there can be no "additional Palestinian state" between
Jordan and Israel -- Jordan already being a "Palestinian
state". The second was that the fate of the territories will be
settled "in accordance with the basic guidelines of the
[Israeli] government". The Israeli plan was accepted without
qualification by the US, and became "the Baker Plan"
(December 1989). Exactly contrary to Miller's account and the
official story, it was only after the Gulf War that Washington was
willing to consider negotiations, recognising that it was now in a
position to impose its own solution unilaterally.

The US convened the Madrid conference (with Russian participation as
a fig leaf). That did indeed lead to negotiations, with an authentic
Palestinian delegation, led by Haidar Abdul- Shafi, an honest
nationalist who is probably the most respected leader in the
occupied territories. But the negotiations deadlocked because Abdul-Shafi
rejected Israel's insistence, backed by Washington, on continuing to
take over valuable parts of the territories with settlement and
infrastructure programs -- all illegal, as recognised even by the US
Justice, the one dissenter, in the recent World Court decision
condemning the Israeli wall dividing the West Bank. The "Tunis
Palestinians", led by Arafat, undercut the Palestinian
negotiators and made a separate deal, the "Oslo Accords",
celebrated with much fanfare on the White House lawn in September
2003.

It was evident at once that it was a sell-out. The sole document --
the Declaration of Principles -- declared that the final outcome was
to be based solely on UN 242 in 1967, excluding the core issue of
diplomacy since the mid-1970s: Palestinian national rights and a
two- state settlement. UN 242 defines the final outcome because it
says nothing about Palestinian rights; excluded are the UN
resolutions that recognise the rights of Palestinians alongside
those of Israel, in accord with the international consensus that has
been blocked by the US since it took shape in the mid-1970s. The
wording of the agreements made it clear that they were a mandate for
continued Israeli settlement programs, as the Israeli leadership
(Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres) took no pains to conceal. For that
reason, Abdul-Shafi refused even to attend the ceremonies. Arafat's
role was to be Israel's policeman in the territories, as Rabin made
very clear. As long as he fulfilled this task, he was a
"pragmatist", approved by the US and Israel with no
concern for corruption, violence, and repression. It was only after
he could no longer keep the population under control while Israel
took over more of their lands and resources that he became an
arch-villain, blocking the path to peace: the usual transition.

So matters proceeded through the 1990s. The goals of the Israeli
doves were explained in 1998 in an academic study by Shlomo ben-Ami,
soon to become Barak's chief negotiator at Camp David: the
"Oslo peace process" was to lead to a "permanent
neocolonial dependency" in the occupied territories, with some
form of local autonomy. Meanwhile Israeli settlement and integration
of the territories proceeded steadily with full US support. It
reached its highest peak in the final year of Clinton's term (and
Barak's), thus undermining the hopes of a diplomatic settlement.

Returning to Miller, she keeps to the official version that in
"November 1988, after considerable American prodding, the PLO
accepted the United Nations resolution that called for recognition
of Israel and a renunciation of terrorism". The actual history
is that by November 1988, Washington was becoming an object of
international ridicule for its refusal to "see" that
Arafat was calling for a diplomatic settlement. In this context, the
Reagan administration reluctantly agreed to admit the glaringly
obvious truth, and had to turn to other means to undercut diplomacy.
The US entered into low- level negotiations with the PLO, but as
Prime Minister Rabin assured Peace Now leaders in 1989, these were
meaningless, intended only to give Israel more time for "harsh
military and economic pressure" so that "In the end, they
will be broken," and will accept Israel's terms.

Miller carries the story on in the same vein, leading to the
standard denouement: at Camp David, Arafat "walked away"
from the magnanimous Clinton-Barak offer of peace, and even
afterwards refused to join Barak in accepting Clinton's December
2000 "parameters", thus proving conclusively that he
insists on violence, a depressing truth with which the peace-loving
states, the US and Israel, must somehow come to terms.

Turning to actual history, the Camp David proposals divided the West
Bank into virtually separated cantons, and could not possibly be
accepted by any Palestinian leader. That is evident from a look at
the maps that were easily available, but not in the NYT, or
apparently anywhere in the US mainstream, perhaps for that reason.
After the collapse of these negotiations, Clinton recognised that
Arafat's reservations made sense, as demonstrated by the famous
"parameters", which, though vague, went much further
towards a possible settlement -- thus undermining the official
story, but that's only logic, therefore as unacceptable as history.
Clinton gave his own version of the reaction to his
"parameters" in a talk to the Israeli Policy Forum on 7
January 2001: "Both Prime Minister Barak and Chairman Arafat
have now accepted these parameters as the basis for further efforts.
Both have expressed some reservations."

One can learn this from such obscure sources as the prestigious
Harvard-MIT journal International Security (Fall 2003), along with
the conclusion that "the Palestinian narrative of the 2000-01
peace talks is significantly more accurate than the Israeli
narrative" -- the US-NYT "narrative".

After that, high-level Israeli-Palestinian negotiators proceeded to
take the Clinton parameters as "the basis for further
efforts," and addressed their "reservations" at
meetings in Taba through January. These produced a tentative
agreement, meeting some of the Palestinian concerns -- and thus
again undermining the official story. Problems remained, but the
Taba agreements went much further towards a possible settlement than
anything that had preceded. The negotiations were called off by
Barak, so their possible outcome is unknown. A detailed report by EU
envoy Miguel Moratinos was accepted as accurate by both sides, and
prominently reported in Israel. But I doubt that it has ever been
mentioned here in the mainstream.

Miller's NYT version of these events is based on a highly-praised
book by Clinton's Middle East envoy and negotiator Dennis Ross. As
any journalist must be aware, any such source is highly suspect, if
only because of its origins. And even a casual reading would suffice
to demonstrate that Ross's account is wholly unreliable. Its 800
pages consist mostly of adulation of Clinton (and his own efforts),
based on almost nothing verifiable; rather, on
"quotations" of what he claims to have said and heard from
participants, identified by first names if they are "good
guys". There is scarcely a word on what everyone knows to have
been the core issue all along, back to 1971 in fact: the programmes
of settlements and infrastructure development in the territories,
relying on the economic, military, and diplomatic support of the US,
Clinton quite clearly included. Ross handles his Taba problem
simply: by terminating the book immediately before they began (which
also allows him to omit Clinton's evaluation, just quoted, a few
days later). Thus he is able to avoid the fact that his primarily
conclusions were instantly refuted.

Abdul-Shafi is mentioned in Ross's book once, in passing. Naturally,
his friend Shlomo ben-Ami's perception of the Oslo process is
ignored, as are all significant elements of the interim agreements
and Camp David. There is no mention of the flat refusal of his
heroes, Rabin and Peres -- rather, "Yitzhak" and
"Shimon" -- even to consider a Palestinian state. In fact,
the first mention of the possibility in Israel appears to be during
the government of the "bad guy", the far- right Binyamin
Netanyahu. His minister of information, asked about a Palestinian
state, responded that Palestinians could call the cantons being left
to them "a state" if they liked -- or "fried
chicken".

This is only for starters. Ross's view is so lacking in independent
support and so radically selective that one has to take with a heavy
grain of salt anything that he claims, from the specific details he
meticulously records verbatim (maybe with a hidden tape recorder) to
the very general conclusions presented as authoritative but without
credible evidence. It is of some interest that this is reviewed as
if it could be considered an authoritative account. In general, the
book is next to worthless, except as giving the perceptions of one
of the actors. It is hard to imagine that a journalist cannot be
aware of that.

Not worthless, however, is crucial evidence that escapes notice. For
example, the assessment of Israeli intelligence during these years:
among them Amos Malka, head of Israeli military intelligence;
General Ami Ayalon, who headed the General Security Services (Shin
Bet); Matti Steinberg, special advisor on Palestinian affairs to the
head of the Shin Bet; and Colonel Ephraim Lavie, the research
division official responsible for the Palestinian arena. As Malka
presents the consensus, "The assumption was that Arafat prefers
a diplomatic process, that he will do all he can to see it through,
and that only when he comes to a dead end in the process will he
turn to a path of violence. But this violence is aimed at getting
him out of a dead end, to set international pressure in motion and
to get the extra mile." Malka also charges that these
high-level assessments were falsified as they were transmitted to
the political leadership and beyond. US reporters could easily
discover them from readily accessible sources, in English.

There is little point continuing with Miller's version, or Ross.
Let's turn to The Boston Globe, at the liberal extreme. Its editors
(12 November) adhere to the same fundamental principle as the NYT
(probably near universal; it would be interesting to search for
exceptions). The editors do recognise that the failure to achieve a
Palestinian state "cannot be blamed solely on Arafat. Israel's
leaders... played their part..." The decisive role of the US is
unmentionable, unthinkable.

The Globe also ran a front-page think-piece on 11 November. In its
first paragraph we learn that Arafat was "one of the iconic
group of charismatic, authoritarian leaders -- from Mao Zedong in
China to Fidel Castro in Cuba to Saddam Hussein in Iraq -- who arose
from anti-colonial movements that swept the globe following World
War II."

The statement is interesting from several points of view. The
linkage reveals, once again, the obligatory visceral hatred of
Castro. There have been shifting pretexts as circumstances changed,
but no information to question the conclusions of US intelligence in
the early days of Washington's terrorist attacks and economic
warfare against Cuba: the basic problem is his "successful
defiance" of US policies going back to the Monroe Doctrine. But
there is an element of truth in the portrayal of Arafat in the Globe
think-piece, as there would have been in a front-page report during
the imperial ceremonies for the semi-divine Reagan, describing him
as one of the iconic group of mass murderers -- from Hitler to Idi
Amin to Peres -- who slaughtered with abandon and with strong
support from media and intellectuals. Those who do not comprehend
the analogy have some history to learn.

Continuing, the Globe report, recounting Arafat's crimes, tells us
that he gained control of the south of Lebanon and "used it to
launch a stream of attacks on Israel, which responded by invading
Lebanon [in June 1982]. Israel's stated goal was to drive the
Palestinians back from the border region, but, under the command of
then-general and defense minister Sharon, its forces drove all the
way to Beirut, where Sharon allowed his Christian militia allies to
commit a notorious massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and
Chatilla refugee camp and drove Mr. Arafat and the Palestinian
leadership into exile in Tunis."

Turning to unacceptable history, during the year prior to the
Israeli invasion the PLO adhered to a US-brokered peace arrangement,
while Israel conducted many murderous attacks in south Lebanon in an
effort to elicit some Palestinian reaction that could be used as a
pretext for the planned invasion. When none materialised, they
invented a pretext and invaded, killing perhaps 20,000 Palestinians
and Lebanese, thanks to US vetoes of Security Council resolutions
calling for ceasefire and withdrawal. The Sabra-Chatilla massacre
was a footnote at the end. The goal that was stated very clearly by
the highest political and military echelons, and by Israeli
scholarship and analysis, was to put an end to the increasingly
irritating Arafat initiatives towards diplomatic settlement and to
secure Israel's control over the occupied territories.

Similar reversals of well-documented facts appear throughout the
commentary on Arafat's death, and have been so conventional for many
years in US media and journals that one can hardly blame the
reporters for repeating them -- though minimal inquiry suffices to
reveal the truth.

Minor elements of the commentaries are also instructive. Thus the
Times think-piece tells us that Arafat's likely successors -- the
"moderates" preferred by Washington -- have some problems:
they lack "street credibility". That is the conventional
phrase for public opinion in the Arab world, as when we are informed
about the "Arab street". If a Western political figure has
little public support, we do not say he lacks "street
credibility", and there are no reports on the British or
American "street". The phrase is reserved for the lower
orders, unreflectively. They are not people, but creatures who
inhabit "streets". We may also add that the most popular
political leader on the "Palestinian street", Marwan
Barghouti, was safely locked away by Israel, permanently. And that
George Bush demonstrated his passion for democracy by joining his
friend Sharon -- the "man of peace" -- in driving the one
democratically elected leader in the Arab world to virtual prison,
while backing Mahmoud Abbas, who, the US conceded, lacked
"street credibility". All of this might tell us something
about what the liberal press calls Bush's "messianic
vision" to bring democracy to the Middle East, but only if
facts and logic were to matter.

The NYT published one major op-ed on the Arafat death, by Israeli
historian Benny Morris. The essay deserves close analysis, but I'll
put that aside here, and keep to just his first comment, which
captures the tone: Arafat is a deceiver, Morris says, who speaks
about peace and ending the occupation but really wants to
"redeem Palestine". This demonstrates Arafat's
irremediable savage nature.

Here Morris is revealing his contempt not only for Arabs (which is
profound) but also for the readers of the NYT. He apparently assumes
that they will not notice that he is borrowing the terrible phrase
from Zionist ideology. Its core principle for over a century has
been to "redeem The Land", a principle that lies behind
what Morris recognises to be a central concept of the Zionist
movement: "transfer" of the indigenous population, that
is, expulsion, to "redeem The Land" for its true owners.
There seems to be no need to spell out the conclusions.

Morris is identified as an Israeli academic, author of the recent
book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited. That is
correct. He has also done the most extensive work on the Israeli
archives, demonstrating in considerable detail the savagery of the
1948- 9 Israeli operations that led to "transfer" of the
large majority of the population from what became Israel, including
the part of the UN- designated Palestine state that Israel took
over, dividing it about 50- 50 with its Jordanian partner. Morris is
critical of the atrocities and "ethnic cleansing" (in more
precise translation, "ethnic purification"): namely, it
did not go far enough. Ben-Gurion's great error, Morris feels,
perhaps a "fatal mistake", was not to have "cleaned
the whole country -- the whole Land of Israel, as far as the Jordan
River".

To Israel's credit, his stand on this matter has been bitterly
condemned. In Israel. In the US he is the appropriate choice for the
major commentary on his reviled enemy.